Intel Launches Xeon E7 v3, OEMs Are Quick to Adopt the Chips

by Jeffrey Burt

The new chips feature Intel’s Transactional Synchronization Extentions (TSX) technology, which streamlines access to shared memory for multi-threaded applications and contributes to six-times performance improvement.

Diane Bryant, senior vice president and general manager of Intel’s Data Center Group, said that “data is the new currency. It’s the currency of the digital world. … There isn’t an institution or business that can’t benefit from big data and analytics.”

During the event launching the new Xeon E7 v3 chips, Bryant and Cloudera CEO Tom Reilly talked about the gains made in analytics during the first year of the partnership between the two companies.

Dell’s 4U PowerEdge R930 offers 22 percent better performance than its predecessor and is designed to run the high-end enterprise applications found on many RISC servers.

Hewlett-Packard used the occasion of the Xeon E7 v3 launch to roll out new and enhanced high-end systems in its Apollo, Integrity Superdome X and ProLiant portfolios. Among the new systems was the ProLiant DL580 Gen9.

Lenovo, seven months after buying IBM’s x86 server business, updated its high-performance X6 lineup, showing off the x3850 and x3950 X6 systems.

Fujitsu announced the quad-socket PrimeQuest 2400E2 and eight-socket PrimeQuest 2800E2 for mission-critical computing, while the eight-socket 2800B2 (pictured) is aimed at memory-intensive workloads.

Bull rolled out the Bullion family of servers, which run on two to 16 Xeon E7 v3 chips in a modular design for enabling both flexibility and performance.

NEC is aiming its new Express5800/A2000 Series of high-end servers at such workloads as big data analytics as well as mission-critical applications.

Super Micro launched three new 4U four-socket SuperServer systems powered by the Xeon E7 v3 chips.

In all, 17 OEMs are developing 45 systems that will be powered by the new Xeon E7 v3 chips, according to Intel officials.